Sodium-carrying pipes sheathed in inert gas? Would you like to make it more complicated (and vulnerable)? The point remains - when you do develop a large scale radioactive sodium fire (and don't tell me it will never happen) how on Earth will you put it out before it spreads radioactivity far and wide? Answer that question.

By the way - my point in quoting Koch is that I don't know much about IFRs but he, more than almost anyone else, does. It is not me you have to refute but Koch. Explain how Koch is wrong on the timescales and problems he describes for IFR development.

But hey - why not just ignore reality when the IFR fantasy is such a pleasant place to live.

Unlike many pronuclear advocates, I do not believe that the people who virulently oppose the use of nuclear energy are actually motivated by a desire to depopulate the earth and live a more simple, low energy lifestyle.

Instead, I see the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) campaign against capable technology like the IFR as being a deception tool of the fossil fuel industry. In the case of the IFR, the fossil fuel industry is joined in motivation by the uranium mining industry. After all, what impact would it have on their business prospects if word got around that we had already mined all of the uranium that we needed for hundreds of years worth of prosperity and power?

The fact is that uranium, plutonium and thorium all contain about 2 million times as much energy per unit mass as oil and about 3-4 million times as much as the best coal.

Neither uranium nor thorium are particularly rare - there are vast resources that are already known and are legally kept out of the market by silly regulations or absurd rules like the three mines policy that was in place in Australia for decades. Plutonium is exceedingly rare in nature, but it is easy to make by irradiating the abundant isotope of uranium (U-238) in a fast reactor.

The thing that the world's hydrocarbon establishment fears more than anything else is the discovery and implementation of an energy source that overcomes the scarcity that has produced most of the petroleum profits. Unfortunately for the fossil fuel industry, the discovery was made in 1942 and refined throughout an intensive period of development. As a bonus, the new energy source happens to be clean enough to run inside sealed submarines.

Fossil fuel interests have fallen back on efforts to limit the IMPLEMENTATION of that energy source through spreading irrational fear.

People like michael, even if he does it unknowingly, are carrying the water of the global fossil fuel industry and its bankers, transporters, advertising media, politicians and material suppliers by helping their FUD campaign.

@michael

Koch was describing challenges and technical obstacles that can be solved, not barriers to development. Sure, it will take a long time to get to the point where we have recycled several generations of fuel through IFRs and solved all of the material challenges that Len identified.

The thing is that we do not need to solve them all before we start building machines that can be producing massive quantities of reliable, emission free electricity while they are creating the raw material needed to solve the problems. The reason that they are not solved already is that no one has been allowed to run any IFRs long enough to produce the unique blend of materials that will be produced with extended radiation exposure in a power producing reactor.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the only logical (immoral, but logical) reason to be adamantly opposed to development and improvement of nuclear energy is because you prefer to depend on profitable fossil fuels.

Even without the IFR, nuclear fission is superior to fossil fuel combustion. The IFR is simply one of many improvement vectors available that answer some of the more frequently repeated challenges - like "what do you do with the waste?"

My answer is, and has been for a couple of decades, you recycle it and make power out of it.

Michael,

I can see that you are technically challenged. This technology is not new, in fact it has been used successfully in high voltage cables for decades, and there are hundreds of kilometres below each city of cables sheathed in SF6 gas for insulation. Large power generators are cooled by pressurised hydrogen which is far far more flammable than sodium. Just because you don't know of it doesn't make it exotic or fragile. The reactor core can be immersed in the gas, and the only sheathed pipes would be relatively short. The sheathing can be made tough and flexible and extremely difficult to penetrate, and immune to earthquakes.

I can see that you are easily frightened by things you don't understand, and that the reality of the IFR reactors which eliminate your main remaining reason to oppose nuclear power is a problem for you. I also see that you have abandoned your other pseudo technical arguments.

The quotes from Len Koch cherry-picked by Michael are taken from a speech by Len that's up on the SCGI website. Among the many omissions that would undercut Michael's arguments is Len's statement that "The science is firmly established," his observation that 35,000 fuel pins were already recycled, etc. Michael also omits the fact that Len was talking about recycling not only uranium and other actinides but about thorium fuel cycles as well, hence his comments about a variety of fuel cycle options. Michael doesn't seem to know that sodium burns with a very cool but very smoky flame in air so it's easy to detect and deal with, that the water wouldn't be in the same structure as the radioactive sodium, etc. Or, worse yet, perhaps he does know it (since he's obviously spent a lot of time on Barry Brook's site and elsewhere where IFRs are discussed at length) but chooses to spread FUD anyway.

I am impressed by the passion of the defenders of theoretical IFRs.

While this is a guess I imagine that,unlike the defenders, I am alone in actually having a licence to handle radioactive substances and I imagine that few of them have actually seen a sodium fire. The question still remains - how will you put out a large scale radioactive sodium fire? The answers so far are all based on the idea that it will never happen. But of course, it would happen one day (if IFRs were ever to be built, which they will not be) and if the fire did happen there would be no safe way of smothering it. Best to ignore that problem completely and pretend that it could never happen (just like Fukushima could never happen).

I am so excited to learn that, despite having openly opposed the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry for many years, I am actually in league with them and doing their bidding! I guess that means I can expect a big, big, fat pay-cheque from them any day now. Exciting! I could really use it.

In case you are wondering - my reason for responding to such an article on IFRs is not because I am afraid that we would ever successfully build one. (We have more chance of a manned return mission to the Moon than that every occurring.) Simply I think that the illusion of IFRs diverts us from focussing our attention (and remaining energy/money) on what can really make a difference to the future of our civilisation - the end of growthist economic ideology, greater efficiency, stable population size and "appropriate" technology.

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